About two weeks ago, we had an electrician come to our house to fix some unsafe outlets and rework the wiring a bit. I think he some how changed the wiring so that upstairs is getting more power now (my computer is downstairs). But on that same day, my mom was on my computer, checking e-mails and whatnot, and when I got on to play my game, my screen had started flickering very badly.
I assumed it was because of the new wiring job, so I unplugged a bunch of stuff in the office room that I didn't need, like desk lamps and a pencil sharpener, but that didn't seem to help at all. So I got on my knees and was messing around with all of the cords under my desk, when I noticed that my UPS box had a red light lit up on the back saying, "Site Wiring Fault." So then I was pretty sure that the electrician must have accidently hit some wire or something when he was here. So I called him up and he came out two days later, he said that the light on the back of the UPS didn't mean anything important, it just means that our "site is not grounded" and it shouldn't effect my computer at all. I showed him how the screen was flickering, and we spent about two hours trying everything we could. He installed a new outlet in the next room and we ran an extension cord to it, we changed UPS boxes, we even tried changing monitors. I could still see the screen flickering, but it wasn't nearly as bad. He had some little tool he used to check the outlets, with three little lights on it, and he said something about the lines not being polarized or something. I really can't remember what all he said, most of it went in one ear and out the other, but he was still pretty sure that it was not because of the wiring. He recommended that if it kept up that I should go to Radio Shack and buy a "noise filter," at least I think that's what he called it. I haven't done that yet though.
So, I downloaded and updated AVG, and ran that for a few hours, and it didn't find any problems or viruses. I then ran SpyBot (because I had noticed a pop-up on Google, which I knew would never have any pop-up's) and it found a ton of problems, so I fixed all of those. But the screen was still flickering, and to my surprise, the next day I got the same type of pop-up on Google again. Needless to say, this has all been very frustrating. Most people are telling me that it's my computer's problem, not the wiring, but I don't know who to beleive. I've tried everything I could think of, I've changed my monitor's resolution, refresh rate, and color, and none of it helps, it usually just makes it worse.
The weird part is, the flickering isn't constant, sometimes it's almost unnoticable, and sometimes it does it so much that the text almost becomes blurred. If I sit here for an hour, playing my game with the flickering monitor, I'll start to get a pretty bad head ache from it. :( (By the way, it's not only when I play my game, but that's when its most noticable. Usually I can't see any difference on the desktop, but if I stare hard enough I can tell that it is flickering a bit.)
I'm not sure what else there is I can tell ya, except for my system specs. I'm running Windows XP Home Edition, with a Pentium 4 processor with 1.5 ghz and 384MB of SDRam and I'm using an ATi Radeon Pro 9800 (128 MB DDR) video card.
Any suggestions or ideas are appreciated. :cool:
